Audrey Watters points to the troubling proliferation of the “Uber for education” analogy. She argues that most “personalized” learning technology seeks both to eliminate the need for professional educators and to make education solely a private good. However, there ought to be ways of using data to recommend paths or courses of action that do not reduce the agency of teachers and students or advance radical individualism. Perhaps a more promising analogy would be "Waze for education"?

Suppose you need to plan your travel schedule for coming weeks around the weather. There are three approaches you might take, listening to groundhogs, hiring meteorologists, or using DarkSky. Each parallels a method leaders supporting education use to inform strategy and design decisions with empirical evidence. The Cambridge Learning Group's approach builds on the strengths of the third option.